A year after the end of the war, in 1946, during the repatriation of the
citizens of the former Poland from the U.S.S.R., some of the remnants of the
refugees returned to Poland  I also returned with my small family.

I felt a strong urge to visit my city. Swept along by sentiment to see the
place to which I was so connected in my memories. I could not help but go. I
could not refrain from seeing my city, Dąbrowa Górnicza. I went
there with a heavy heart. I felt I would find no peace of mind until I had
viewed the ruins of my life in my city, the places where I took my first steps
and had the first experiences of my childhood.

I walked for hours through the city, thinking that perhaps, in spite of
everything, I would find someone. I saw the house at number 11 Sobieskiego
Street, where I lived with my family, was educated, and grew up. And there was
our yard, where I played with children when I was young, where I showed off my
new clothes for the holidays of Pesach and Sukkot. And there was the house
opposite, where the family of Zlotnik the metal worker the lived.

I passed Reden and saw hundreds of miners dark with coal dust, just as they
used to be. I peered at the Huta Bankowa buildings and the welder's shop, where
my cousin Herszl (Sztorchajn) and I had tried to learn the profession, but were
forced to leave because of the anti-Semitic sentiment there. I crossed the
bridge over the railroad tracks and walked to the pools created by the mining
of the coal in underground springs. All around were woods and fields of grass,
where I had spent many long hours in the evenings and on Sabbath afternoons
with my friends from Hashomer Hatzair (the Young Guard). I passed by the large
marketplace and remembered the huge gatherings of thousands of workers and
miners, who would come together and agitate for their demands on the first of
May, and the strikes and demonstrations that extended from the monument to
Kościuszko out into the streets of the city.

Hashomer Hatzair center in 1918 in Dąbrowa Górnicza
at a Zaglembian conference

[Page 216]

The only thing I didn't see were Jews  I did not find the owners of the
Jewish workshops  the tailors, the smithies, the shoemakers and the
seamstresses, nor the carpenters or the glaziers; there no longer were any
Jewish shopkeepers, no rich people, and none of those who would wait
impatiently for long hours in their dilapidated shops for the half-zloty
shopper who was late in coming. The city of Dąbrowa that once existed was
no longer; the small-scale center blessed with many hundreds of Jewish families
who nurtured Jewish culture, with a revolutionary movement, with political
parties, and with pioneering youth who redefined the meaning of life and
proudly raised the flag of rebellion against subjugation and the lack of
purpose in their lives.

There no longer remained any sign of the hundreds of families that were
destroyed and burned by the Nazis. And there were no remains of the youth
movements, of the fiery young men and women with whom I lived for years, a
guard of revolutionary socialist fighters, soldiers in the underground against
the Nazi beast, and those who made the desert bloom in our far-off homeland.

The Nazi monster did not leave a single trace  it erased all of the
beloved characters, demolished the area of my childhood, destroyed everything
and covered it all with ashes. All that remained were hidden memories of days
gone by, the documentation of a generation that was sentenced to obliteration,
an understanding of the period and a commemoration of those fearful days.

1917  1922

These are the years that designed and affixed the seal on the process of my
development, the period in which youth movements awakened and developed in our
city, among them the movement Hashomer Hatzair, in which I grew up and was
educated along with a generation of idealists who fulfilled their dreams,
together with many dozens of young men and women who searched for a new world;
better, more just, and honorable.

The Perkal brothers, Cwi Sztorchajn and Majer Grajcerwearing garments of the period  1918

We were driven to find answers to the painful problems in our parents' homes
and the schools, to find a goal and a purpose.

Members of Hashomer Hatzair at a send-off for their friends
before they made aliyah, 1921

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